Christmas Cupcakes - Chocolate Peppermint Swirl, Holiday Spice with Eggnog Buttercream

So I'm not actually sure that Christmas cupcakes are a "thing."

Most people go with cookies, seasonal breads, or chocolates. But I like cake, y'all. Now cookies, candies, and breads, don't go getting all offended now, I love you too, but this year cake (cupcakes to be exact) won out as the gift of choice.  I made these for my colleagues and some friends, and they seemed to be a pretty solid success. I used a couple tried and true cake recipes for the cupcakes, and tweaked the buttercream to make these fit for consumption between Thanksgiving and New Year's.

Above, legions of cupcakes waiting to receive their frosting. If I wouldn't be mortified to show you what my kitchen looks like at this stage of the process, you could see that every surface that wasn't covered with sugar, frosting, piping tips, flour, and other such paraphernalia was covered with more cupcakes. Seriously. I made like 800 of these things. Well, maybe more like 160. But still. Lots.

As often happens, I couldn't choose between two flavors, and I don't believe my recipients should have to either, so I made both. Chocolate cupcakes with peppermint swirl buttercream, and Holiday Spice (which is totally just normal spice cake, but if you say holiday spice it makes people feel all Christmas-y and stuff) with eggnog buttercream. Both are simple to make (the piping of the peppermint frosting was the trickiest part) and so yummy. And making them in minis is good for the holiday season, where they will no doubt be sharing the dessert spotlight with numerous other treats vying for real estate in your stomach.

Whip some up this holiday season (or whenever really, it's not like peppermint is exclusive to Christmas, despite what Starbucks would have you believe), and enjoy time with family and friends.

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Chocolate Mini Cupcakes 

with Peppermint Swirl Buttercream

(from The Pioneers Woman's Chocolate Sheet Cake)

You can see my instructions here; it's the same chocolate cake I use to make cake pops.

Ingredients
2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 heaping tablespoons cocoa
2 sticks butter
1 cup boiling water
1/2 cup buttermilk
2 whole beaten eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon vanilla

Directions
Preheat oven to 350°
In a mixing bowl, combine the flour, sugar, and salt.In a saucepan, melt the butter. When butter is completely melted, add the cocoa.When butter and cocoa is well mixed, add the boiling water. Stir well. Allow this mixture to boil for 30 seconds, and then pull off the heat.Pour the chocolate mixture into the flour mixture in the mixing bowl.Mix gently to let the mixture cool.In a separate measuring cup, combine the buttermilk, the beaten eggs, the vanilla, and the baking soda.Add the buttermilk mixture to the mixing bowl and mix until incorporated.
Spoon into mini baking cups (a little over half full) in a mini muffin pan. 
Bake 8-10 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. Be careful, these are very easy to overbake as they are so tiny!

Peppermint Buttercream frosting

Ingredients

2 sticks (1/2 lb) unsalted butter
4-6 cups confectioner's sugar (more sugar means a stiffer frosting)
1/4 teaspoon salt
2-3 tablespoons heavy cream
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1-3 teaspoons peppermint extract (to taste, this can be strong for some people)
red food color

Directions

In the large bowl of a mixer, with a paddle attachment, beat the butter for about 3 minutes.
Gradually add the sugar, 1 cup at a time, beating well after each addition. If you don't beat it in between, the frosting might end up grainy.
Add salt during one of the sugar additions.
Add two tablespoons of cream and vanilla, and beat well. Add cream to reach desired consistency (stiffer is better for piping).
Separate the frosting into halves in two bowls. To one bowl, add red food color until you reach the desired color (peppermint red). Add peppermint extract to red frosting 1/2 teaspoon at a time, tasting in between additions.
You could of course make all the frosting peppermint, or make the white peppermint, but I chose to make the red peppermint, and it's fun to have it swirled in with the white, which is still regular vanilla.

To pipe the swirled frosting, I made two small bags (12") filled with the red frosting, and two small bags filled with the white frosting. 

Snip the tips off all four bags, then slide them down into a large bag (at least 16") fitted with a piping tip (I used a Wilton 2D), ensuring that the openings of each small bag are all lined up as close as possible.

Then all you have to do is pipe away! It can be tricky to get it flowing at first (since you're working four bags at once), but as it warms up in your hands it will move smoothly. 

 They would be cute left like this, but I found these adorable candies at Williams Sonoma this year, and the little green trees look perfect perched on top of the swirly frosting.

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Holiday Spice Cupcakes with Eggnog Buttercream

Ingredients

2 1/2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon groung ginger

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup brown sugar, firmly packed

1 cup granulated sugar

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/4 cups buttermilk

Directions

Preheat oven to 350ºF.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices. 

Cream butter in the bowl of your mixer. Add sugars, eggs, and vanilla. Beat at high speed for 4-5 minutes, or until the mixture becomes light and fluffy, scraping often.

Add dry ingredients alternately with buttermilk, using lowest speed of mixer (to avoid overmixing) until just combined.

Spoon into mini cupcake papers (a little over half full) in a mini muffin tin.

Bake 8-10 minutes (or until toothpick comes out clean). Be careful not to overbake these -  it's very easy to do, since they are so tiny.

Eggnog Buttercream

Ingredients

2 sticks (1/2 lb) unsalted butter
4-6 cups confectioner's sugar (more sugar means a stiffer frosting)
1/4 teaspoon salt
2-3 tablespoons heavy cream
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

3-6 tablespoons eggnog (to taste)...you could make your own, but I use store bought. It's yummy and it saves a ton of time

1/2 - 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, plus extra for garnish

Directions
In the large bowl of a mixer, with a paddle attachment, beat the butter for about 3 minutes.
Gradually add the sugar, 1 cup at a time, beating well after each addition. If you don't beat it in between, the frosting might end up grainy.
Add salt during one of the sugar additions.
Add two tablespoons of cream and vanilla, and beat well. Add cream until just stiffer than desired consistency (stiffer is better for piping).

Add eggnog a tablespoon at a time until the taste is to your liking.

Pipe the frosting on using any tip you like (or heck, spread it on with a knife, dip 'em in there like chips and salsa, or smear it on with your fingers. Just try not to eat it all before it makes it to the cupcakes. It's good). I used a Wilton 1M, and managed to mostly pipe it onto cupcakes instead of directly into my mouth.

Sprinkle cinnamon onto the finished product. This is so pretty all by itself, but I did add some snowflake sprinkles to some of them, just to be extra festive.

 Here they are all packaged up ready to be delivered to work friends. These are fun, festive, and yummy. And easy, which means you can focus more time on friends, and family. After all, that's what's truly important. Much love, joy, and happiness for a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year!

A Girly Cake for a Baby Girl

Sugar and spice and everything nice. That is what little girls are made of.

Cake too. Especially when the top tier is spice cake, and the other two are white with raspberry and chocolate with more raspberry. And dark chocolate ganache. Smothered in cream cheese frosting and almond buttercream respectively.

This is one of my favorite cakes I have made. Ever. Like ever ever.

Why? Because of my emotional connection to it, and because of this:

And this:

And how the whole thing came together as a whole.

My best friend just became a Mommy for the first time this summer. We threw her a girly pink shower this spring, and I made this cake (duh). We wanted it to be cutesy but not kitschy, pink, but subtle, and mouthwateringly scrumptious. This was one of those designs that kind of percolated in the back of my mind for a couple weeks before all of a sudden becoming glaringly obvious as the perfect idea, and for once, execution almost identically matched my expectations.

The new Daddy-to-be's favorite cake is spice, so we made the little top tier spice cake (with cream cheese frosting) for him - it was set aside at the shower, and was taken home to be eaten later (since this was a traditional no-boys-allowed kind of shower). The other two tiers were those always crowd-pleasing white with raspberry filling and almond buttercream, and chocolate with raspberry and bittersweet ganache filling (also with almond buttercream).

Here they are all ready to be stacked and decorated. Spice cake front and center, and white and chocolate right behind.

The ombré look was pulled off with a combination of roses and fondant. The top and bottom layers were smothered in simple piped frosting roses (the "cheating" kind that I posted about a while back). The roses faded from a pretty pink at the bottom to white at the top (OK, almost white, but I was plumb out of clear vanilla extract).

The striped fondant tier in the middle was made to match the middle pink tone of the ombré for a continuous look top to bottom (or bottom to top...glass half full? The chicken or the egg?). The fondant tier was simple too. I made my homemade marshmallow fondant, first in white to cover the tier (which was, of course, frosted lightly to give the fondant something to cling to).

Then I mixed in some pink food coloring until it matched the pink I was going for, rolled it out, used a ruler and a pizza cutter to make the stripes, and "glued" them to the cake with a tiny bit of water.

When I was laying the stripes on the cake, I started on the top of the tier (not all the way to the center, since another tier was going to sit on top of it), and glued them down the sides before cutting off the excess even with the bottom of the tier. To space them evenly, do one, then another on the opposite side of the cake, and then do the ones halfway between those, etc. If you do one, and then another right next to it, and so on around the cake, you are likely to end up with too much or too little space when you get back to where you started.

For some cakes, I would decorate the tiers separately to avoid damaging finished tiers in the process. However, since this cake would be finished on the morning of the shower and the roses are pretty easy to smoosh (totally a word, even if spellcheck doesn't think so), I stacked it before I piped on the roses. The fondant tier was the only one completely finished before stacking. The others were only crumb-coated.

I loved the finished product. Still do. It was so so pretty and so so yummy. It will be hard to beat in the future.

This fun cake was a fun way to celebrate the imminent arrival of a sweet baby girl. Now that she is here, I am madly in love with her, and I am thrilled to be her "Auntie Katira."

Here we are on the fourth of July (2 weeks after she joined us in the world). Her outfit even matches her cake (that I'm sure she enjoyed in-utero)!